Why CDTV failed?

[AestheticDebris]

The idea was ahead of the technology, it needed the creation of DVD to be able to store video at a sufficiently high quality to make playback superior to VHS. The whole era seemed defined by everyone trying to leap on the technology and not standing back and realising this wasn't the time to be first to market.

[Seiya]

a part the price of the console compared maybe other OCS/ECS model based on flopy disk that really has been a fail step for Commodore, CDTV productions and multimedia was more or less in line with many other Windows 3.x PC CD multimedia and Encyclopedias products.

[CCCP alert]

If Defender of the Crown II was a launch title................

[lionagony]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

If Defender of the Crown II was a launch title................

or Jim Sach's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea [ Show youtube player ]

[Amigajay]

I don’t think any amount of decent games would have made the system popular, even Philipd who spent a billion dollars on the cd-i and licensed plenty of decent ports from other systems couldn’t save it from a financial disaster….they were just machines in a market that simply wasn’t there to enable them to be a success.

Worth a punt of course, at least Commodore smelt the disaster after 6 months of production and halted it, Philips tried and tried and got to a point where they thought damn we know we are losing money, but we have come too far to admit it, here’s some more money to make some more game ports in 1997!

[eXeler0]

If it's any consolation, during the DVD era "Nuon" was a thing they tried (Samsung and others) and of course that also failed..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuon_(DVD_technology)
The fact that PS2 played DVDs, killed off a lot of such ideas..

The CDTV was one of those things that was a good idea on paper, but the hype / marketing / consumer awareness / killer apps just weren't there to succeed.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Worth a punt of course, at least Commodore smelt the disaster after 6 months of production and halted it, Philips tried and tried and got to a point where they thought damn we know we are losing money, but we have come too far to admit it, here’s some more money to make some more game ports in 1997!

Heh, good point. The CD hype really took off in 1993 with games like Myst and 7th Guest, but that was when paired with an expensive PC. Buying a dedicated and expensive device just for the 'multimedia' experience indeed just sounded good on paper.

[Seiya]

I continue to think that CDTV must be a multimedia, novels, entertainment platform, not mainly to play videogames. To play you could use Amiga 500 or PC or Consoles. Maybe Commodore hoped with CDTV to compete with Philips CDi (onother flop).

[oscar_ates]

They invested heavily on the cdtv. Hiring some expensive people on the project. When it flopped all were fired or left Commodore. Mehdi and Irvin inept and shortsighted management could also play a role here. A lot of money wasted om this project and also Thomas Rattigan case cost 9 million to Commodore. They could had payed the patent easily with these wasted money instead.

[eXeler0]

Lets not forget someone actually spent time on the CDTV-II as proven by some 60 (?) prototypes that were created.
In some ways it was a cost reduced version, but in some other ways it was an improvement.
But quite likely, it would have made very little difference.

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by lionagony

or Jim Sach's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea [ Show youtube player ]

Yeah that looked amazing, think that was CD32/AGA with good use of cycling palettes in the 256 colours you could assign but I'm sure Sachs could have converted them down to ECS screen/palette. Think Jim replied to me on his channel and told me the actual code/graphics were lost and these were from pre-recorded videos (he sent to Disney when asking about licensing their movie).

[oscar_ates]

In the Brian Bagnall s commodore final years book I read that commodore sank 90 mil$ on CDTV project and it sold a few hundreds in US. Also before releasing at a CES show a computer magazine journalist asked Irving Gould who would be the target audience/buyer of this machine and Irving answered Consumers! So that guy had a better understanding of the computer market and dynamics then whole commodore's management

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

The idea was ahead of the technology, it needed the creation of DVD to be able to store video at a sufficiently high quality to make playback superior to VHS.

They could have gone LaserDisc instead - this would of course be more expensive, but a LD-player combined with an Amiga is a powerful combination.
(AmigaVision is even capable of driving LD-players...)

There are also various data formats to store data on an LD like it was used as early as 1985 by the BBC Doomsday project.
Others are LD-G (used in karaoke machines) and LV-ROM.

This would have been a better idea, but still not have been the "big thing" Commodore was hoping for.

The CDTV introduction was huge amount of wasted money, better spent on further research and cost reduction as well on getting AGA out earlier.

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by Gorf

They could have gone LaserDisc instead - this would of course be more expensive, but a LD-player combined with an Amiga is a powerful combination.
(AmigaVision is even capable of driving LD-players...)

There are also various data formats to store data on an LD like it was used as early as 1985 by the BBC Doomsday project.
Others are LD-G (used in karaoke machines) and LV-ROM.

This would have been a better idea, but still not have been the "big thing" Commodore was hoping for.

The CDTV introduction was huge amount of wasted money, better spent on further research and cost reduction as well on getting AGA out earlier.

LaserDisc at that point in time wasn't a viable solution, everything was moving towards CD. The problem I see is at the time and with the CDTV being a stacked system for the living room, it needed an MPEG decoder and the ability to shoe 24bit images at ~24FPS.

It was lacking AGA, enough CPU for real-time performance and a decent video player like we have now with AGABlaster.
If it could achieve those goals and even with the higher price point it could have served a niche market, it was never going to be a number 1 seller for Commodore.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

LaserDisc at that point in time wasn't a viable solution, everything was moving towards CD. The problem I see is at the time and with the CDTV being a stacked system for the living room, it needed an MPEG decoder and the ability to shoe 24bit images at ~24FPS.

It was lacking AGA, enough CPU for real-time performance and a decent video player like we have now with AGABlaster.
If it could achieve those goals and even with the higher price point it could have served a niche market, it was never going to be a number 1 seller for Commodore.

90/91 MPEG-1 was just not there yet ...the world's first mass produced decoder chip was the C-Cube CL450 from 1992.
And when it was out it was just worse than VHS.
LD has a least a very good picture quality that rivals DVD - only the short runtime per side was unfortunate.

In some sense yes: 91 was probably too late for LD, and too early for VideoCD

A Amiga "LDTV" in 1988/89 would have been a success ...

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Gorf

An Amiga "LDTV" in 1988/89 would have been a success ...

Just like the Nuon DVD would be a success in 2000?

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by alexh

Just like the Nuon DVD would be a success in 2000?

I have a Nuon player. It was the dvd version of the cdi idea. I think it has a game library of 5 tiltles
There really are no examples of succesful projects like that. OTOH tons of ppl bought a ps2 to also get a dvd player.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by alexh

Just like the Nuon DVD would be a success in 2000?

No but in 98, when the Nuon was planned to be released and the PlayStation 2 was not to be released in the same year and DVD was still a new thing.

It is hard to find numbers, since the NUON chipset was in a whole bunch of DVD players and things like the Motorola Streammaster, but I guess it is save to say it sold a magnitude more devices than the CDTV did.

As for an Amiga "LDTV"
There were probably more LaserDisc games using the Amiga technology released than Nuon games - despite of Commodore never supporting it officially or making such a device. Making such a device in the 80s could well have turned out profitable in the 80s.

But again: the little resources Commodore had to spend, would have been better put in chipset development at any time.

[eXeler0]

The CDTV is one of those projects where I actually have some sympathies for Commodore. From many angles, it makes sense. But pricepoint for what you got, timing to market, marketing strategy and killer software availability just didnt happen the right way.

With the good old benefit of hindsight, they should have never gone that route snd should have poured that money into finalizing AAA and launching a product based on it in 1991.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by eXeler0

The CDTV is one of those projects where I actually have some sympathies for Commodore. From many angles, it makes sense. But pricepoint for what you got, timing to market, marketing strategy and killer software availability just didnt happen the right way.

With the good old benefit of hindsight, they should have never gone that route snd should have poured that money into finalizing AAA and launching a product based on it in 1991.

I agree, with hindsight, any product that fails is easy to criticise, but the whole cd-rom multimedia era was new and exiting and nobody knew how it would play out.

It was still a premium product, so instead of the (UK pricewise) £599, a £499 would have been better, and yes it’s still alot, but not compared to cd-rom drives for PCs and Mac’s costing upwards of £500 at that time, if a product is good then people will pay the price, it often gets maligned for being an expensive games console, but that’s not what it was.

Timing wise, for the market it aimed at it was the right time (but nobody knew the market wouldn’t really exist and expand) but Commodore did rush it, even though it was planned well (just check the comprehensive developers manual compared to the paltry little CD32 one to see where the money went!).

From the off though they were trying to play catch-up with the CD-i (which was delayed multiple times over 5 or so years previous) and first promised Photo CD support, then said it will come later, via the AVM? board, they also promised FMV (despite recent denials in interviews) probably a Commodore rep mouthing off!

Both of which in the end the original machine couldn’t do, only the CR machine would have, if it launched, so two major ‘multimedia’ aspects (viewing photos and watching movies) were already lacking from the off.

I do believe more and better quality games would have come if sales would have been better so it wasn’t one of the biggest reasons for it’s failure imo, i do like some of the other multimedia discs and range the CDTV had though, that’s one aspect Commodore did have a jump over Philips for the first year, some of the bigger ones were later ported to the CDi probably to try and recoup some of the development cost back!